The Sex Lives of Cannibals

CHAPTER 6

In which the Author, in case Anyone was Wondering what exactly he was Doing on Tarawa while his Girlfriend Toiled, discusses his Plan for making Productive Use of his Time on an atoll.

Each morning, Sylvia would rumble to work in a pickup truck, confident that through her endeavors the lives of the I-Kiribati would soon be a little brighter, a little healthier, and a little longer. After Kate left, Sylvia was the only I-Matang at FSP. She had a staff of ten, all of whom were older than her, and together they managed programs that sought to improve child and maternal health, alleviate vitamin A deficiency, raise environmental awareness, and advance the cause of sanitation, which included building composting toilets, or Atollettes, because, as mentioned earlier, something really needed to be done about the shit on Tarawa, and Sylvia was the woman to do it. “It’s really cool,” she said, uncharacteristically. “We’re going to use it as fertilizer in the demonstration garden.” Great, I thought. One more potential source of dysentery to worry about. But use the poop she did, and every few months the most malodorous stench imaginable would waft over the island as Bwenawa mixed the compost with fish guts and pig manure and spread it around the garden, teasing the tomatoes and cabbage to life. Sylvia was happy. She was in her element.

I too was very busy. Thinking. I had decided to write a novel. It would be a big book, Tolstoyan in scale, Joycean in its ambition, Shakespearean in its lyricism. Twenty years hence, the book would be the subject of graduate seminars and doctoral dissertations. The book would join the Canon of Literature. Students would speak reverentially of the text, my text, in hushed, wondrous tones. Magazine profiles would begin with The reclusive literary giant J. Maarten Troost… I had already decided to be enigmatic, a mystery. People would speak of Salinger, Pynchon, and Troost. I wondered if I could arrange my citizenship so that I would win both the Booker and the Pulitzer for the same book.

To get in the right state of mind, I read big books—Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Ulysses by James Joyce (okay, I skimmed parts of that one). I read King Lear. Inexplicably, Sylvia thought I was procrastinating.

And so one day, I plugged in my laptop. I opened a new document. The cursor blinked. I looked out the window. I watched ocean swells. Were those dolphins? Tuna, maybe. I gazed at a few passing clouds—a horse, a battleship, my aunt’s nose, breasts. I boiled a pot of water. What’s that floating stuff? It’s probably dead. It’s okay then. I turned back toward my computer. The cursor was still blinking. And then… nothing. Writer’s block.

I was not worried. I read somewhere that it took Gabriel García Márquez months to come up with his first sentence, and then all followed, the sweet pouring forth of a writer’s vision. Sylvia suggested I write an outline. Outlines are for the creatively impaired, I explained. Did Kerouac use an outline? Not likely. The important thing was to attain a certain state of being, a transcendental awareness of life, and then the words, the magical words, would simply appear and the writer simply had to transcribe those words. Sylvia noted that Kerouac was a drug-addled drunk and quite dead as a result. Well, writing is pretty edgy, I said.

I went back to my first sentence. The hours passed. The days, too. Also the weeks. And then finally… a sentence. I read it. I read it again. I altered it. I erased it.

The cursor blinked.